Like a hurtling, fevered train
Now here’s a man with whom I could do business. I don’t necessarily want my politicians to be crack addicts – just honest.
The man brought in by Ken Livingstone to transform London’s transport system admits today that he is an alcoholic. Bob Kiley, 72, says he starts drinking vodka in the afternoons, “and once I’ve lost control it’s hard to pull back”.
Mr Kiley also admits he does little to earn the £3,200-a-day fee he gets as a consultant for Transport for London.
“I’m an alcoholic,” he says. “But I’m not going to make excuses and say the reason is because I lost my family because, facts are, I always liked a drink. It is true, though, that things have got worse now that I’m not exactly overworked. I’ve always had high-pressure jobs that kept me extremely busy; now that I’ve got time on my hands, I start drinking.”
He added: “Most people who know me well know I’m alcoholic, so why should I worry about the rest of the world? I’m dealing with it.”
In a frank interview published in full in [yesterday's] Evening Standard, he admits that his consultancy fees, which translate to an annual salary of £737,000, are difficult to justify. He said: “If you ask me what I actually do to earn my consultancy, I’d have to tell you, in all honesty, ‘not much’. ” Mr Kiley earned £3.9 million during his time as transport commissioner and continues to live rent free in a grace and favour Belgravia townhouse. He got a £2million severance deal and he was retained as a 90 day a year consultant to the Mayor after he quit.
Mr Kiley spoke out to counter rumours that his alcoholism affected his job. He said: “My drink didn’t affect my work while I was full time employed, and anyone who says it did is talking bullshit.”
Contrast Mr Kiley’s candour with the knots in which David Cameron has tied himself simply trying to avoid even answering questions about his previous drugs use or abstention: such wriggling is as unedifying as Bill Clinton’s bollocks about ‘smoking but not inhaling’.
The media is partly to blame for the way in which it sensationalises everything and everyone in political life and boils everything down to soundbites. However, surely our politicians are at least equally culpable for their failure to treat the electorate as grown ups with half an inch of brain? State the truth, let the public decide. Don’t run scared of saying, “I’m 40 years old and – 20 years ago as a student, like a great deal of my contemporaries – I smoked the odd bit of draw. I don’t do so today, I don’t intend to do so in the future, and I don’t expect – if ever elected to the office of Prime Minister – to skin up in the Buckingham Palace loo. Can we talk about the dirty hospitals now, please?”
Christ alone knows what’s going to happen with the next generation of politicians if we don’t grow up and discuss drugs sensibly because, as a 36-year-old, I know an awful lot of 34 to 38-year-olds who were off their tits on E most Friday and/or Saturday nights throughout the early and mid 1990s and who have subsequently become responsible parents and upstanding members of polite society. Are we to preclude their participation in public life just because Fleet Street’s finest are a bunch of lazy hypocrites who prefer the easy hysteria of a headline to an in-depth discussion about drug use in 21st century Britain?